How To Meditate For Beginners: A Quick Primer

Meditation is a simple practice that can drastically improve your daily life with a small amount of time. It has been around for thousands of years and is something every man should implement into his routine. Today we will be covering different forms of meditation you can do and the benefits you’ll receive from them. We hope you learn a lot of new things and enjoy your meditating journey!

How To Meditate For Beginners

So what is meditation exactly? It’s defined as the practice of training your ability to focus on one thing and also stay in the present moment. There are many ways you can go about meditation and the benefits include:

Improves self esteem and emotional resilience. By continually rec-entering yourself during meditation, this will be something you can do at any time.

Makes you more relaxed in general and gets you in a better mood. Right after meditating you will feel better and this will keep up the more you keep practicing.

Gives you better focus when you are performing other tasks in your daily life. You will notice that you get less distracted and can work much more productively. Problem solving, recall and retention have also been proved to increase.

Your immune system will get a boost meaning you will get sick less often. Breathing, heart rate and blood pressure also receives a positive change. Inflammation in the body is reduced when you meditate as well.

Types of Meditation

The first and best known form of meditation is what is known as vippasana or breathing meditation. This is perfect for beginners and is used even by the most experienced people. Here is how you can do it:

Begin by sitting down on a mat, pillow, or comfortable floor. Cross your legs and sit your palms in your lap over one another.

Close your eyes and begin taking slow, deep breathes. Bring your awareness to various parts of your body like your neck, shoulders, back, and legs. If you feel any discomfort, use this time to re-position yourself until your entire body is relaxed.

Continue taking deep breaths and focus on the feeling of the air entering your nose and into your stomach. Focus on the sound, how your diaphragm raises, and how your diaphragm rests back into place.

Every time a feeling or thought arises, bring your awareness back to your breathing. Do this for 5 to 10 minutes if you are new to meditating. It’s best to set an alarm if you can to help you.

The next form of meditation focuses purely on presence and can be done anywhere at anytime:

Where ever you are and what ever you’re doing, stop when you are thinking unnecessary thoughts or having unproductive feelings.

Bring your attention back to the task at hand if you’re at work or studying.

Focus on the environment around you from the colours, people, to all of the sounds you hear. Put your awareness on the sound of the wind, people chatting, or how beautiful the sky looks for example.

Do this as much as you can throughout the day and you’ll notice that you feel much better and have less internal chattering going on that usually just distracts you.

One of the most positive emotions we can feel is gratitude which is why this next meditation is based around it:

Take a break from what you are doing right now at this moment.

Sit or lay in a comfortable position.

Think of all of the things you are grateful for like friends, family, money, food, shelter, and similar things. You can also look around where ever you are and be grateful for the nice weather or the water you’re drinking for example.

It doesn’t matter how big or small it is, as long as you focus on being grateful with thoughts such as “I am grateful for X”, “I am grateful for Y because it does X for me”.

You don’t have to meditate for very long periods of time to reap the benefits. Over time you will notice the improvements we mentioned earlier take place in your life from having a better mood to increased cognition. Eventually you will be able to meditate for sessions but always implement an amount that suits your schedule. Meditating is best done first thing in the morning or in the evening so try out various times and see what works best for yourself.